


This Is All That I'm Not

by Swordy



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s07e03 The Girl Next Door, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-07
Updated: 2012-05-07
Packaged: 2017-11-05 00:24:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/399849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Swordy/pseuds/Swordy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>As short straws go, this isn’t all that bad. The patient is a young man, mid-thirties maybe, and an attractive one at that, so being charged with helping him out of his clothes and into the standard issue hospital gown could be considered more reward than chore.</i>
</p>
<p>Outsider POV.  Slightly AU as for the purposes of this story, Castiel did not remove all of Dean’s scars for a second time at the end of ‘Swan Song’.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is All That I'm Not

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** One brief allusion to possible self mutilation. 
> 
> **Spoilers:** Up to and including season 7. Set during 7x03 ‘The Girl Next Door’ while the boys are in the hospital. 
> 
> **Author’s note:** Unbetaed so all mistakes are mine. Thank you to reapertownusa and juppschmitz who gave me the requested kick up the backside to pick one of my many WIPs to get finished! I hope this doesn’t disappoint. Comments or feedback are always gratefully received. Title taken from Allison Iraheta’s song ‘Scars’.
> 
> **Disclaimer:** Sadly not mine (unlike the mistakes).

As short straws go, this isn’t all that bad. The patient is a young man, mid-thirties maybe, and an attractive one at that, so being charged with helping him out of his clothes and into the standard issue hospital gown could be considered more reward than chore. Sadly his reaction to the morphine they gave him when they re-set his leg means he’s completely out of it, which always makes her job harder.

Her colleagues always take the easy option; an unconscious patient needing undressing is easily remedied with a pair of scissors and, hey, it’s only clothes, right? But she doesn’t go down that route, hasn’t ever since she found an elderly vagrant patient weeping over his tattered rags rendered unwearable by her decisive cuts because they were all he had. Ever since, she’s taken more time and more care.

She doesn’t know if the unconscious man has other clothes. He doesn’t _look_ like a vagrant but she’s been wrong before. They know his name is ‘Dean’ but they never got beyond that to discuss the niceties of last names and insurance details and the like before they drugged him to the eyeballs, for pain relief obviously, but also to cease his distress for the guy they brought him in with. They’re not sure why he was insisting that he and his brother needed to leave, but they _were_ sure that he needed to keep still while they fixed his leg and so drugs were brought in, taking the place of fruitless negotiation.

She studies his face while he sleeps. On superficial inspection he appears blemish-free, but to lean in and really _look_ , the way she allows herself to now because he’s out for the count, she can see marks – scars that have healed kindly, that no one in their right mind would object to when his obvious good looks greatly negate their damage - and lines that speak of worry and pain and a lifetime’s worth of crap.

_Poor guy_ she thinks as she works his jeans down over his hips. The right leg has been cut to facilitate the necessary medical treatment and she mentally apologises, hoping they weren’t his favourites or, worse still, his only pair. His unfettered left leg has yet more scars of varying length and depth and she finds herself wondering how and why he has so many old injuries.

Many clearly owe their healing to time alone but others have obviously been stitched, although the technique used to close those wounds doesn’t speak of trained medical personnel. A couple look so shakily done she wonders if he’s done them himself and she’d be right; indeed, the one she’s studying at that moment was done by his own fair hand, with whiskey as his anaesthetic, after a poltergeist threw an antique mirror at him and he hadn’t trusted his soulless brother to sew him back together with the usual care and compassion that Sam had possessed before his trip downstairs.

Despite the scars, the limb is well-muscled and, taking that and the rest of him into account, she’d definitely describe him as ‘stocky’, so being homeless and hungry seems even less likely. He’s a mystery for certain and she tries and fails to recall another patient she’s found so intriguing.

As she goes to work on removing his t-shirt, she reveals an abdomen that supports her previous discoveries. There is no six-pack, but there is subtle definition that speaks of regular physical activity and _more scars._ She touches one almost reverently – it’s a textbook stab wound and her eyes flick back to his face, searching for something that will make him _look_ like the kind of person who would have such injuries, but all she sees is a young, handsome man instead of a shifty ne’er-do-well who might somehow deserve to be on the wrong end of a blade.

Her fingers move on, mapping his injuries. There’s another one - a bad one - and she hates to think how he might have acquired it. The edges are jagged and puckered, the stitches that were supposed to close it have created almost as much damage as the wound itself and the scar tissue is shiny and silvered like a burn. She wonders, if he were conscious, would she ask about its origin. Probably not.

She doesn’t know that other girls have asked him how he got it and will again in the future. The question usually arises when they’re emboldened by alcohol and on the verge of intimacy, but he always equivocates, using compliments and an easy smile that doesn’t quite meet his eyes to deflect from having to answer as he charms his way out of their scrutiny and into their pants.

Even his own brother doesn’t know the truth about that scar despite having seen it and tentatively asked about it several times over the years. Sam doesn’t know that Henriksen’s ghost did more damage to his body than just a few bruises during the Rise of the Witnesses debacle.

Sam also doesn’t know that afterwards, fuelled by a life-threatening amount of alcohol, a similar amount of guilt and self-loathing, the torments of Hell and the frighteningly consuming need to prove that he was _alive,_ he had attempted to cauterise and stitch the wound himself, the deliberate and excessive pain he inflicted on his own body silencing his distress, albeit temporarily.

She’s no idea that these scars, as terrible as they are, are only a fraction of the ones that _should_ be there. She’ll never know, but it’s doubtful she’d believe the truth – that an angel removed his old injuries when he resurrected this boy’s body after recovering his soul from hell. The scars tell her he’s been through a lot, but she has no clue how tough his life has really been _._

There is another clue though and it saddens her greatly, to the point where she’s almost trying to pretend she hasn’t noticed it at all, but she’s worked with enough troubled people over the years to recognise the familiar tang of alcohol pervading his skin in a manner that can only speak of regular and repeated use. She’s not surprised though; after all, she was present when they searched his jacket pockets for some form of ID and found a hip flask instead.

She eases his t-shirt off one arm then pauses for a moment before working the garment over his head but despite the activity, he doesn’t stir. People react differently to morphine and it’s clear that the drugs have knocked this guy for six although she knows from his medication charts that they gave him _a lot._

Bunching up the remaining fabric she grips his left wrist to ease the t-shirt off and that’s when she notices it. She’s seen plenty of hypertrophic scarring before but this... this is like nothing she’s ever seen before because... well, because it looks like a _hand._ She studies it, mesmerised, and is reaching out to touch it before she even realises what she’s doing. It’s an old scar but the raised, shiny skin is still livid.

Her fingers trace it lightly – it’s definitely a hand - and she tries to think of any scenario that could result in such an injury but comes up blank. She doesn’t know why, but out of all his injuries this one makes her feel uncomfortable, like she’s viewing something private that she has no right to see. She quickly covers him with the hospital gown and secures the only tie that she can get access to, at the top of his back.

She avoids touching or looking at the hand print while she does it.

She wonders about it for the rest of her shift though. A couple of colleagues ask her if she’s okay because she’s unusually quiet and she contemplates telling them what she’s seen but stops because it feels like an invasion of the young man’s privacy. For all his visible scars he’ll undoubtedly have psychological ones too and she’s certain that whatever he’s done to end up so _marked_ he doesn’t deserve to be treated like a freakshow, so she smiles and tells them she’s just a little tired.

Several hours later, with curiosity lapping at her heels like the ocean, she makes the decision to return to his room. She hopes he’ll be conscious and that he’ll be friendly enough so that she might discover a little about him even if she’s not bold enough to bring up the subject of his scars but when she gets there he’s gone, along with his clothes and the crutches one of her colleagues had left in his room.

She asks around but it seems like no one noticed the guy with the broken leg, even a handsome one who was probably still high on morphine when he left. It seems like there are too many strange things occurring in the hospital that day for anyone to have noticed, except her it seems.

She asks about the brother he was brought in with but it seems he’s disappeared too. Members of staff have also gone missing – in three weeks’ time the charming Dr. Gaines will be the most prominent physician to be included in that number. She knows their disappearances are connected somehow – her mystery patient might even be _responsible_ for them.

What she’ll never know is how important that one man has been to the survival of the human race and how important he’ll _continue_ to be.

But she’ll remember the scars. _Always_ the scars.

 

**End**


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